Magnetic tower: Within and between-team collaboration experiential exercise

Despite collaboration being integrated into business education, challenges remain in preparing students to collaborate in modern organizations. This challenge is partially due to educators primarily focusing on within-team collaboration while, due to increased work complexity, organizations have moved to multiteam systems which also require between-team collaboration. Therefore, we developed the Magnetic Tower, which integrates within and between-team collaboration in an experiential learning exercise. In this exercise, teams implement within-team collaboration aspects such as communication, coordination, balancing members’ contributions, and mutual support as well as between-team collaboration aspects such as boundary spanning, knowledge sharing, and integration to successfully complete the project.